An outage of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia has taken down Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram, and other services. According to numerous Twitter and our own checks, all three services are unavailable as of Friday evening at 9:10 p.m. PT.

App migration and management startup CliQr Technologies has come out of stealth mode. Its CloudCenter software is aimed to help enterprises move their apps to public and private clouds, the company announced today. One of the more pressing problems for enterprises that are interested in tapping the power of the cloud is the hassle of moving well-established local apps to the cloud and managing them there.

Enterprise cloud storage startup Box has added much-welcome Android support to its OneCloud solution that keep files synced even when using third-party apps, the company announced today. The OneCloud solution helps solve one of the most annoying problems with mobile files - if you create or edit a document on your phone, it can be a chore to make it accessible to others wanting to see it on the desktop.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than one trillion objects for its cloud customers, the company announced Tuesday in a blog post. The S3 service is used by many developers and engineers for scalable and relatively cheap cloud-based infrastructure.

I am kicking myself for buying a Windows ultrabook a couple weeks ago. Now that Dell has announced its Ubuntu-running ultrabook made specifically for developers, this sleek little machine I hold in my hands is no longer fairest in the land.

BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti discusses the copyright implications of all the adorable cats, disappointed otters, and worried monkeys that grace the site. It all started when I was looking at a photograph of an otter that was, BuzzFeed said, "disappointed that [I] never finished Infinite Jest."

Just as we found out yesterday that much-anticipated Google Drive might replace Google Docs , the search giant has increased Google Docs storage to 5GB from 1GB, indicating an imminent Drive launch with answers to all our questions. Drive has been in the making since 2007, when now-CEO Larry Page worked internally with other Googlers to launch a service called "G Drive."

J.K. Rowling's Pottermore website that lets Harry Potter fans explore the books' universe and interact with other fans has finally opened registration for anyone who wants access. Pottermore was announced last June as a site where Potter fans can read new content about the Potter universe and as an online shop to purchase the books in e-book format.

Aerospace giant Boeing is hard at work developing a super-secure Android phone that the U.S. government can use for defense and intelligence purposes, the company revealed to National Defense Magazine . The device, dubbed "the Boeing phone," will offer a more secure version of the open-source Android OS.

Korean electronics giant Samsung is launching its own mobile ad network to challenge Apple, Google, and Millennial Media, according to the Wall Street Journal . While Apple's iAd hasn't been particularly successful (so much so that Apple revised its terms in February and again earlier this week ), Millennial Media has stuck it out as an independent mobile ad company that successfully IPO-ed last week .

At VentureBeat's Mobile Summit event today, very few panelists mentioned the impact that Windows Phone was having in the mobile world. But that clearly changed the minute Nokia exec Hans-Peter Br&#248;ndmo got on stage to chat about the future of the company and its crazy 41-megapixel camera-phone.

Social media darling Pinterest is dominated by female users. Men, for the most part, haven't yet been attracted to the concept of "pinning" pictures they like and sharing them. But Snatchly, a recently launched Pinterest imitator, might have found a way to get guys to keep coming back: porn.

On his first-ever earnings conference call, newly christened Research in Motion CEO Thorsten Heins seemed to come to terms with the crappy hand he's been dealt and admitted that the company was in need of "substantial change." "I've been the CEO of RIM for just over 10 weeks now," Heins said on the call.

Energy management systems startup Vigilent has raised a $6.7 million round of funding to optimize energy efficiency at data centers using the power of "big data," the company announced Tuesday morning. One huge problem companies struggle with when it comes to data center management is how much power those facilities use.